Central African Republic’s Seleka rebels call for secession amid sectarian war
Rebels in the Central African Republic are calling for the
establishment of a new country as a radical solution to the worsening
sectarian conflict.
The name – the Republic of Northern Central Africa
– and a design for a national flag, are circulating by mobile phone in
the dusty town of Bambari, which divides the CAR’s largely Christian
south from a northern region now controlled by the mostly Muslim Seleka
rebels, according to Reuters. But the United Nations, the African Union,
the former colonial power, France, and many analysts insist that this
is neither likely nor desirable.
The call for partition echoes numerous secessionist movements
across Africa, where arbitrary borders drawn by colonial mapmakers
disregarded and cut across ethnic boundaries. South Sudan, the CAR’s
neighbour, gained independence from Sudan in 2011 – but is now embroiled
in a civil war of its own.
Bambari has become a sanctuary for Muslims fleeing lynch mobs in
the south; a convoy of French peacekeepers escorted 100 Muslims there
last Monday from the capital, Bangui.
Such evacuations, which are continuing, are tantamount to
accepting partition, the minister for reconciliation and communications,
Antoinette Montaigne has conceded.
Abdel Nasser Mahamat Youssouf, member of a youth group in Bambari
lobbying for the secession of the north, was quoted as saying: “The
partition itself has already been done. Now there only remains the
declaration of independence.”
A colleague, Oumar Tidiane, said of the south: “They don’t want
any Muslims. Rather than calling their country the Central African
Republic, they can call it the Central African Catholic Republic.”
Militias known as the “anti-balaka” have driven tens of thousands
of Muslims from the south, destroying mosques and virtually wiping out
the Muslim population of Bangui. The UN high commissioner for refugees,
António Guterres, has said the country faces “massive ethnic-religious
cleansing”, while Amnesty International has warned of a “Muslim exodus
of historic proportions”.
But there is no simple split. Before the crisis it was estimated
that half the CAR’s population was Christian and just 15% Muslim. David
Smith, a director of Okapi Consulting, who spent several years in the
country, said: “The number of Muslims in the CAR was small and now it is
dramatically smaller. The number calling for secession is so small that
it’s hardly worth listening to them.
“There are some people who want to compare it with Sudan and South Sudan but that is completely off the mark.
“There are lot of independence movements all over this continent
and most have more steam behind them than a group of young men in the
CAR. It’s coming predominantly from Chadians and Sudanese who want to
have free rein in the region,” he added.
Indeed, an independent north would play into the hands of
neighbouring Chad and Sudan, whose mercenaries played a major part in a
coup in March last year, sparking a backlash along religious lines that
forced the Seleka to cede power in January. This is just one reason why
partition is implacably opposed by the CAR’s interim president,
Catherine Samba-Panza. The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, has also
warned of its dangers and the French president, François Hollande, has
vowed to prevent it.
It is also unlikely to win much sympathy in the rest of Africa,
where governments are resisting separatist movements everywhere from
Angola to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, from Nigeria to Kenya,
from Somalia to Zimbabwe. At independence half a century ago, the
Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) declared the
borders immutable to prevent wars erupting.
It made a special case for South Sudan but is hardly like to do
the same for the CAR. Koffi Kouakou, a foreign-policy expert at Wits
University in Johannesburg, said: “The partition of the CAR is not
likely to happen and is not desirable at political and economic levels.
“The social evidence on the ground shows that while the strife of
ethnic cleansing is increasingly becoming a grave concern in many parts
of Africa, mainly in central Africa, the partition of the CAR is a
mirage at this stage.
“The international community will not allow it as a matter of
course. A divided CAR is not feasible on international jurisdiction and
on paper.”
Kouakou added: “There may be an urgent need for a solution to
isolate the warring populations for a while to help subside the
violence. But it will not be in the interest of all parties to seek a
secession of the mainly Muslim north away from the Catholic south.
“The partition of Sudan, a bordering country, is the evidence
that the partition of a country is in fact not the solution to deep
ethnic rivalries in Africa.”
Smith said: “It’s undesirable because the CAR as it stands is not
a functioning state and has never been a functioning state. Cutting the
CAR – which was the weakest part of French Equatorial Africa – in half
will mean one half has virtually no infrastructure of any kind. If you
don’t have Bangui, you don’t really have anything.”
“It serves nobody’s interest to create another basket-case state that requires aid from the international community.”
Not all Muslims favour the move either. Ibrahim Alawad, one of a
small band clinging to their homes in Bangui, said on Friday: “It cannot
be just like that. You grow up in one country and you live in one
place. We want to know what is in the minds of our fellow Christians.
“I don’t want to see the country divided. Why not dialogue?

Because dialogue historically has never worked between religious factions. Look at the Crusades. The Goan Inquisition. The Albigensian Crusade.
For more topical examples, there is of course the Holocaust, the Yugoslav Wars…there seems to be an ongoing source even into the 21st century.
Religion is a mask that keeps humanity from looking at itself in the mirror.
Till the next post then.

What is it that makes self-proclaimed
centrists such easy marks for right-wing con men? Actually, it’s not
that much of a mystery: the centrist creed is that the two parties are
symmetrically extremist, and this means that there must, as a matter of
principle, be Serious, Honest Republicans out there — so such people
must be invented if they don’t actually exist. Hence the elevation of
Paul Ryan despite clear evidence of his con-artist nature.

That affair ended up in a breakup over
Bridgegate, but the evidence of Christie’s true nature was obvious all
along. I wrote two years ago about his fiscal fakery,
and in particular the way he tried to silence independent critics of
his budget projections via crude, vicious personal attacks.

Now Vox tells us that the critics were in fact completely right, and that Christie’s budget projections were absolutely as unrealistic as they said.

Can we say that someone who tries to browbeat
anyone daring to question rosy scenarios is someone who should never,
ever be allowed near higher office? And can we also say that there’s
something very wrong with pundits who failed to see the obvious about
this guy?

Libertarians have always been flummoxed by inequality, tending either
to deny that it’s a problem or pretend that the invisible hand of the
market will wave a magic wand to cure it. Then everybody gets properly
rewarded for what he or she does with brains and effort, and things are
peachy keen.
Except that they aren’t, as exhaustively demonstrated
by French economist Thomas Piketty, whose 700-page treatise on the
long-term trends in inequality, Capital In the 21st Century, has blown up libertarian fantasies one by one.
To
understand the libertarian view of inequality, let’s turn to Milton
Friedman, one of America's most famous and influential makers of free
market mythology. Friedman decreed that economic policy should focus on
freedom, and not equality.
If we could do that, he promised, we’d
not only get freedom and efficiency, but more equality as a natural
byproduct. Libertarians who took the lessons from his books, like Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and Free to Choose (1980), bought into the notion that capitalism naturally led to less inequality.
Basically,
the lessons boiled down to this: Some degree of inequality is both
unavoidable and desirable in a free market, and income inequality in the
U.S. isn’t very pronounced, anyway. Libertarians starting with these
ideas tend to reject any government intervention meant to decrease
inequality, claiming that such plans make people lazy and that they
don’t work, anyway. Things like progressive income taxes, minimum wage
laws and social safety nets make most libertarians very unhappy.
Uncle Milty put it like this:

“A
society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of
freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.… On the other
hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end
up with both greater freedom and greater equality.”

Well,
that turns out to be spectacularly, jaw-droppingly, head-scratchingly
wrong. The U.S. is now a stunningly unequal society, with wealth piling
up at the top so fast that an entire movement, Occupy Wall Street,
sprung up to decry it with the catchphrase “We are the 99%.”
How
did libertarians get it all so backwards? Well, as Piketty points out,
people like Milton Friedman were writing at a time when inequality was
indeed less pronounced in the U.S. than it had been in previous eras.
But they mistook this happy state of affairs as the magic of capitalism.
Actually, it wasn’t the magic of capitalism that reduced inequality
during a brief, halcyon period after the New Deal and WWII. It was the
forces of various economic shocks plus policies our government put in
place to respond to them that changed America from a top-heavy society
in the Gilded Age to something more egalitarian in the post-war years.{Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!}
As you’ll recall, if you watched the movie Titanic,
the U.S. had a class of rentiers (rich people who live off property and
investments) in the early part of the 20th century who hailed from
places like Boston, New York and Philadelphia. They were just as nasty
and rapacious as their European counterparts, only there weren’t quite
so many of them and their wealth was not quite as concentrated (the
Southern rentiers had been wiped out by the Civil War).

The
fortunes of these rentiers were not shock-proof: If you remember
Hockney, the baddie in James Cameron’s film, he survives the Titanic
but not the Great Crash of ’29, when he loses his money and offs
himself. The Great Depression got rid of some of the extreme wealth
concentration in America, and later the wealthy got hit with substantial
tax shocks imposed by the federal government in the 1930s and '40s. The
American rentier class wasn’t really vaporized the way it was in
Europe, where the effects of the two world wars were much more
pronounced, but it took a hit. That opened up the playing field and gave
people more of a chance to rise on the rungs of the economic ladder
through talent and work.

After the Great Depression, inequality
decreased in America, as New Deal investment and education programs,
government intervention in wages, the rise of unions, and other factors
worked to give many more people a chance for success. Inequality reached
its lowest ebb between 1950 and 1980. If you were looking at the U.S.
during that time, it seemed like a pretty egalitarian place to be
(though blacks, Hispanics, and many women would disagree).
As
Piketty notes, people like Milton Friedman, an academic economist, were
doing rather well in the economy, likely sitting in the top 10 percent
income level, and to them, the economy appeared to be doing just fine
and rewarding talents and merits very nicely. But the Friedmans weren’t
paying enough attention to how the folks on the rungs above them,
particularly the one percent and even more so the .01 percent, were
beginning to climb into the stratosphere. The people doing that climbing
were mostly not academic economists, or lawyers, or doctors. They were
managers of large firms who had begun to award themselves very
prodigious salaries.
This phenomenon really got going after 1980,
when wealth started flowing in vast quantities from the bottom 90
percent of the population to the top 10 percent. By 1987, Ayn Rand
acolyte Alan Greenspan had taken over as head of the Federal Reserve,
and free market fever was unleashed upon America. People in U.S.
business schools started reading Ayn Rand's kooky novels as if they were
serious economic treatises and hailing the free market as the only path
to progress. John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged(1957),
captured the imaginations of young students like Paul Ryan, who
worshipped Galt as a superman who could rise to the top through his
vision, merit and heroic efforts. Galt became the prototype of the kind
of “supermanager” these business schools were supposed to crank out.
Since
the ‘80s, the top salaries and pay packages awarded to executives of
the largest companies and financial firms in the U.S. have reached
spectacular heights. This, coupled with low growth and stagnation of
wages for the vast majority of workers, has meant growing inequality. As
income from labor gets more and more unequal, income from capital
starts to play a bigger role. By the time you get to the .01 percent,
virtually all your income comes from capital—stuff like dividends and
capital gains. That’s when wealth (what you have) starts to matter more
than income (what you earn).
Wealth gathering at the top creates
all sorts of problems. Some of these elites will hoard their wealth and
fail to do anything productive with it. Others channel it into harmful
activities like speculation, which can throw the economy out of whack.
Some increase their wealth by preying on the less well-off. As
inequality grows, regular people lose their purchasing power. They go
into debt. The economy gets destabilized. (Piketty, and many other
economists, count the increase in inequality as one of the reasons the
economy blew up in 2007-'08.)
By the time you get to 2010, U.S.
inequality, according to Piketty’s data, is quantitavely as extreme as
in old Europe in the first decade of the 20th century. He predicts that
inherited property is going to start to matter more and more in the U.S.
as the supermanagers, the Jamie Dimons and so on, bequeath their
gigantic hordes of money to their children.
The ironic twist is
this: The reason a person like the fictional John Galt would be able to
rise from humble beginnings in the 1950s is because the Gilded Age
rentiers lost large chunks of their wealth through the shocks the Great
Depression and the deliberate government policies that came in its wake,
thus loosening their stranglehold on the economy and society. Galt is
able to make his fortune precisely because he lives in a society that
isn’t dominated by extreme concentrated wealth and dynasties. Yet the
logical outcome of an economy in which there is no attempt made to limit
the size of fortunes and promote greater equality is a place in which
the most likely way John Galt can make a fortune is to marry an heiress.
So it was in the Gilded Age. So it may be very soon in America.
Which
brings us back to Friedman’s view that people naturally get what they
deserve, that reward is based on talent. Well, clearly in the case of
inherited property, reward is not based on talent, but membership in the
Lucky Sperm Club (or marriage into it). That made Uncle Milty a little
bit uncomfortable, but he just huffed that life is not fair, and we
shouldn’t think it any more unjust that one person is born with
mathematical genius as the other is born with a fortune. What’s the
difference?
Actually, there is a very big difference. It is the
particular rules governing society that determine who amasses a fortune
and what part of that fortune is passed on to heirs. The wrong-headed
policies promoted by libertarians and their ilk, who hate any form of
tax on the rich, such as inheritance taxes, have ensured that big
fortunes in America are getting bigger, and they will play a much more
prominent role in the direction of our society and economy if we
continue on the present path.
What we are headed for, after
several decades of free market mania, is superinequality, possibly such
as the world has never seen. In this world, more and more wealth will be
gained off the backs of the 99 percent, and less and less will be
earned through hard work.
Which essentially means freedom for the rich, and no one else.

Monday, April 28, 2014

Once again we have antisemitism hiding under another label. Now they call it "anti-Zionism". God forbid Jews defend themselves against people who have been attempting to "throw them into the sea" for over 65 years.

If the USA had been attacked with the ferocity and frequency our Arab friends have attacked Israel we would have turned them and their country into GLASS.

I'm quite aware of the institutionalized antisemitism that still thrives in the USA. It includes all sorts of folks -- white, brown, and black -- blaming Jews for everything from climate change, financial failures, acne, boils, and cancer. After all, what do you expect from "The JEW"?

Now it tries to be "respectable" -- "Boycott - Divest - Sanction". This for our only real ally in the middle east. This for people who have been under attack from the very beginning. Fighting wars, fighting terrorists while making the desert bloom.

We once admired them. Now some supposed "progressives" support the folks who stone women, stone gay folks - if the don't just kill them other ways - and have a history of forced "conversions". People who took over North Africa and the Middle East with the sword --- "convert or die".

Today our so-called "progressives" support folks who are stuck in the 15th century.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

This,
Just In! “Politicians don’t seem to
care very much about what the public thinks: when elite preferences
and popular preferences are different, the elite almost always wins.”
If you pay the band it plays your song.

Fan,
Stuff Hitting The: There are allegations
that Poland's NATO-installed leadership was pressured last fall to
provide a month or so of training to persons to be dispatched to
Ukraine to stir up trouble. Now Biden
runs off to Kiev to boost the morale of the chosen oligarchs in
our struggle to appropriate Ukraine's natural resources for Western
Capitalists. Back in DC, the US warns Putin he has “days, not
weeks” to fall in line. Grab your popcorn, the exciting part is
coming right after the commercials.

No
Gold From Straw: A new study confirms what has long been suspected – the main
value of corn bioifuels are the dollars it lets the politicians
distribute to favored clients, and not in reducing CO2 buildup in the
atmosphere. In fact it is a tad worse than gasoline in killing the
planet as we know it. The politicians and the bioifuel industry
quickly claimed that it was the study's methodology and not corn
biofuels that were flawed.

Days
Of Whine and Rosieness: Science geeks
aat the US AID say that there will not be enough arable land,
available water or needed energy to sustain the 9 billion expected to
populate the earth by 2050, resulting in starvation, famine and
migration becoming “politically destabilizing” - which is science
talk for war. They didn't mention plague, but that's in there too.
Why don't scientists just keep busy figuring out ways for the rich to
get richer and quit scaring the rest of us?

Philanthropy is not charity, it is the rich using tax
write-offs to shape society to their purposes. D
S Wright

Monday, April 14, 2014

Here's another selection of "headlines". Perhaps now you understand my despair. In fact, most of this crap goes well beyond anything you might call satire.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Minneapolis restaurant owner and local group were forced this week to defend a Nazi-themed party.

The gathering, replete with Nazi flags and men clad in uniforms, was a
Twin Cities historical society's annual Christmas party. But the party
wasn't held in December. It was thrown in January. On Martin Luther King
Jr. Day, no less.
Photos of the party were published this week by the Minneapolis alt weekly newspaper City Pages. The paper subsequently received additional photos and information about the gathering.
According to the Star Tribune,
a staff member at Gasthof zur Gemutlichkeit, the restaurant that hosted
the event, lost his job last week after admitting to taking photos and
sharing them with friends.
Gasthof’s owner Mario Pierzchalski doesn't understand the uproar. An
immigrant of Poland, Pierzchalski said the participants were merely
"actors" and "peaceful people." Even so, Pierzchalski said that after
six years of hosting the party, the event will no longer be held at his
establishment.
“So now we have a lot of bad messages on our phones; they want to
burn down the building,” he told the Star Tribune. “We live in a free
country...but from the comments I see, a lot of people they don’t see
what freedom is. If I break the law, punish me. But we did this for so
many years and everything was fine.”
Pierzchalski has not responded to TPM's request for comment. When TPM
called Gasthof’s, the woman on the other end seemed accustomed to
handling inquiries about the controversy.
"Is this about the article?" she asked.
The organizers of the event have also insisted that they were not making a political statement.
Scott Steben, the organizer of the party, told the Star Tribune this
week that "[b]y no means do we glorify the edicts of the Third Reich."
According to the newspaper, Steben has had roles as a German soldier in
"at least three movies."
Jon Boorom, who also participated in the event, compared the party in
an interview with City Pages to "a Star Trek convention but for WWII
enthusiasts."
On Wednesday, Steben issued an apology and said he understood "that some of the items we displayed at the dinner have made people feel uncomfortable."

Today marks the beginning of Passover, celebrating the liberation of the Jews from Egypt over 3300 years ago.

It lasts seven days in Israel, but eight in the diaspora.

This past weekend, a RABID anti-Semite killed three innocent people outside a Jewish Center and a Jewish senior living community. The Dr. and grandson shot and killed outside the Jewish Center were both Methodists -- but, I guess they "looked Jewish" to the killer - a former klu-klux-klan "leader", insane anti-Semite, candidate for public office, and ex-con.

As I've said before -- sooner or later "they" ALWAYS come for the Jews. It NEVER fails. Every attempt to be a "good German", a "good" whatever eventually fails -- simply because, whenever we have bad times, some fool will ALWAYS blame it on the Jews.

Now we have antisemitism raising its ugly head on both right and left -- the right wing with its usual "Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion", it's general "anti-anything-black-brown-non-Christian" (of the "approved" kind), and it's fear of "hippies", and damn near anything "different". The supposed left cloaks its antisemitism in "anti-Zionism", while giving hard line Muslims who will not accept Israel as a "legitimate" country (wishing to drive them into the sea) a pass on all they do - and many of them "do" a lot.

It makes no sense for American Jews to support the Republican Party, and their support of the Democratic party must be dependent on reciprocal support from Democrats.

This does NOT include support for groups of ultra-orthodox folks who tend to publicly denigrate women and DEMAND their rules be followed in PUBLIC places. It is, after all, still the USA - right?

Oh, by the way, antisemitism is on the rise WORLDWIDE. Choose your friends carefully. Always remember: NEVER AGAIN

-------------------------------------

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

The very latest from Robert Reich. Please follow link to original.
-----------------------------------------------------------http://robertreich.org/

Momentum is building to raise the minimum wage. Several states have
already taken action — Connecticut has boosted it to $10.10 by 2017,
the Maryland legislature just approved a similar measure, Minnesota
lawmakers just reached a deal to hike it to $9.50. A few cities have
been more ambitious — Washington, D.C. and its surrounding counties
raised it to $11.50, Seattle is considering $15.00
Senate Democrats will soon introduce legislation raising it nationally to $10.10, from the current $7.25 an hour.
All this is fine as far as it goes. But we need to be more ambitious. We should be raising the federal minimum to $15 an hour.
Here are seven reasons why:
1. Had the minimum wage of 1968 simply stayed even with inflation, it would be more than $10 an hour today. But the typical worker is also about twice as productive as then. Some of those productivity gains should go to workers at the bottom.
2. $10.10 isn’t enough to lift all workers and their families out of
poverty. Most low-wage workers aren’t young teenagers; they’re major
breadwinners for their families, and many are women. And they and their families need a higher minimum.
3. For this reason, a $10.10 minimum would also still require the
rest of us to pay Medicaid, food-stamps, and other programs necessary to
get poor families out of poverty — thereby indirectly subsidizing
employers who refuse to pay more. Bloomberg View describes McDonalds and
Walmart as “America’s biggest welfare queens” because their employees
receive so much public assistance. (Some, like McDonalds, even advise their employees to use public programs because their pay is so low.)
4. A $15/hour minimum won’t result in major job losses because it
would put money in the pockets of millions of low-wage workers who will
spend it — thereby giving working families and the overall economy a boost, and
creating jobs. (When I was Labor Secretary in 1996 and we raised the
minimum wage, business predicted millions of job losses; in fact, we had
more job gains over the next four years than in any comparable period
in American history.)
5. A $15/hour minimum is unlikely to result in higher prices because
most businesses directly affected by it are in intense competition for
consumers, and will take the raise out of profits rather than raise
their prices. But because the higher minimum will also attract more
workers into the job market, employers will have more choice of whom to
hire, and thereby have more reliable employees — resulting in lower turnover costs and higher productivity.
6. Since Republicans will push Democrats to go even lower than
$10.10, it’s doubly important to be clear about what’s right in the
first place. Democrats should be going for a higher minimum rather than
listening to Republican demands for a smaller one.
7. At a time in our history when 95 percent of all economic gains are
going to the top 1 percent, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour
isn’t just smart economics and good politics. It’s also the morally
right thing to do.
Call your senators and members of congress today to tell them $15 an
hour is the least American workers deserve. You can reach them at
202-224-3121.

Time for a visit to "Some Assembly Required". I am beginning to think it should be renamed, "A Survey Of Stupidity" - but, there seem to be times when it's not stupidity but some sort of criminal activity combined with short term thinking. Also what is seen as self serving by folks too stupid to understand we are all in this mess together. Please follow link to original.
-------------------------------------------------------------------http://ckm3.blogspot.com/

You
Shouldn't Be In Kansas Anymore, Toto:
Acting at night, over the weekend, brave GOP'ers in Kansas have
nullified the existing contracts of the state's public school
teachers, stripping them of tenure, making them individually
renegotiate their existing contracts without any union representative
tainting the process. And if a teacher does not agree to this
process, termination is automatic and cannot be appealed. This
travesty was committed in lieu of providing court-ordered funding
levels to the state's public schools.

Get
Off Your Ash: A judge has told the NC
Environmental Management Commission that it had both the power and
the responsibility to get on Duke Energy's ass about the massive and
ongoing pollution from its 'coal ash ponds”, and that the
Commission should “require an immediate halt to pollution.” The
Commission, a wholly owned subsidiary of Duke Energy, is appealing
the decision.

Yawn:
So many scared, ignorant parents in Oregon have refused to have
their little darlings vaccinated against measles that the disease is
on the rise again. Politically correct stupidity reigns supreme.

About
Farce:
In January, small business were at their most optimistic levels in
seven years. That has collapsed in the subsequent two months to
reach levels last seen back when we all knew who Lehman Brothers was.------------------------------------------------------------------

If
you're poor, the only way you're likely to injure someone is the old
traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by
club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car.
But if you're
tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any
manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that
will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass
murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons
or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If
you're the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of
thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers – the US and Russia – still hold
the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth.
So do
the carbon barons. But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about
violence from below, not above.
Or so I thought when I received a press release
last week from a climate group announcing that "scientists say there is a direct link between changing climate and an
increase in violence". What the scientists actually said, in a
not-so-newsworthy article in Nature two and a half years ago, is that there is higher conflict
in the tropics in El Nino years, and that perhaps this will scale up to make
our age of climate change also an era of civil and international conflict.
The
message is that ordinary people will behave badly in an era of intensified
climate change.
All this makes sense, unless you go back to the
premise and note that climate change is itself violence. Extreme, horrific,
longterm, widespread violence.
Climate change is anthropogenic – caused by human
beings, some much more than others. We know the consequences of that change:
the acidification of oceans and decline of many species in them, the slow disappearance
of island nations such as the Maldives, increased flooding, drought, crop
failure leading to food-price increases and famine, increasingly turbulent
weather. (Think Hurricane Sandy and the recent typhoon in the Philippines, and
heat waves that kill elderly people by the tens of thousands.)
Climate change is
violence.
So if we want to talk about violence and climate
change – and we are talking about it, after last week's horrifying report from the world's top climate scientists – then let's talk about climate change as violence. Rather than worrying about
whether ordinary human beings will react turbulently to the destruction of the
very means of their survival, let's worry about that destruction – and their
survival. Of course water failure, crop failure, flooding and more will lead to mass migration and climate refugees – they already have – and
this will lead to conflict. Those conflicts are being set in motion now.
You can regard the Arab Spring, in part, as a climate
conflict: the increase in wheat prices was one of the triggers
for that series of
revolts that changed the face of northernmost Africa and the Middle
East. On the one hand, you can say, how nice if those people had not
been hungry in the
first place. On the other, how can you not say, how great is it that
those people stood up
against being deprived of sustenance and hope? And then you have to look
at the
systems that created that hunger - the enormous economic inequalities in
places such as Egypt and the brutality used to keep down the people at
the
lower levels of the social system, as well as the weather.
People
revolt when their lives are unbearable.
Sometimes material reality creates that unbearableness: droughts,
plagues, storms, floods. But food and medical care, health and
well-being, access to housing and
education – these things are also governed by economic means and
government policy. That's what the revolt called Occupy Wall Street was
against.
Climate change
will increase hunger as food prices rise and food production falters, but we
already have widespread hunger on Earth, and much of it is due not to the
failures of nature and farmers, but to systems of distribution. Almost 16m children in the United States now live with hunger, according to the US
Department of Agriculture, and that is not because the vast, agriculturally
rich United States cannot produce enough to feed all of us. We are a country
whose distribution system is itself a kind of violence.
Climate
change is not suddenly bringing about an
era of equitable distribution. I suspect people will be revolting in the
coming
future against what they revolted against in the past: the injustices of
the
system. They should revolt, and we should be glad they do, if not so
glad that they need to. (Though one can hope they'll recognize that
violence is not necessarily where their power lies.) One of the events
prompting the French
Revolution was the failure of the 1788 wheat crop, which made bread prices skyrocket
and the poor go hungry. The insurance against such events is often thought to
be more authoritarianism and more threats against the poor, but that's only an
attempt to keep a lid on what's boiling over; the other way to go is to turn
down the heat.
The same week during which I received that
ill-thought-out press release about climate and violence, Exxon Mobil
Corporation issued a policy report. It makes for boring reading, unless
you can
make the dry language of business into pictures of the consequences of
those
acts undertaken for profit. Exxon says:

We are confident
that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become 'stranded'. We
believe producing these assets is essential to meeting growing energy demand
worldwide.

Stranded assets that mean carbon assets –
coal, oil, gas still
underground – would become worthless if we decided they could not be
extracted
and burned in the near future. Because scientists say that we need to
leave
most of the world's known carbon reserves in the ground if we are to go
for the
milder rather than the more extreme versions of climate change. Under
the
milder version, countless more people – species, places – will survive.
In the best-case scenario, we damage the Earth less. We are currently
wrangling about how much to
devastate the Earth.
In every arena, we need to look at industrial-scale and
systemic violence, not just the hands-on violence of the less powerful. When
it comes to climate change, this is particularly true. Exxon has decided to bet
that we can't make the corporation keep its reserves in the ground, and the company is
reassuring its investors that it will continue to profit off the rapid,
violent and intentional destruction of the Earth.
That's a tired
phrase, the destruction of the Earth, but
translate it into the face of a starving child and a barren field – and
then
multiply that a few million times. Or just picture the tiny bivalves:
scallops,
oysters, Arctic sea snails that can't form shells in acidifying oceans
right
now. Or another superstorm tearing apart another city. Climate change is
global-scale violence, against places and species as
well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start
having a real
conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against
brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that
brutality.

Freshman Rep. Vance McAllister (R-LA), who campaigned on a platform of
"defending our Christian way of life" and on the "defense of natural
marriage" has been caught on video
making out with a young female staffer. Local news outlets are
speculating about an affair. McAllister has issued the usual statement
asking for privacy while his family gets through this extremely fucking
embarrassing time.

There’s no doubt I’ve fallen short and
I’m asking for forgiveness. I’m asking for forgiveness from God, my
wife, my kids, my staff and my constituents who elected me to serve.
Trust is something I know has to be earned whether you’re a husband, a
father or a congressman. I promise to do everything I can to earn back
the trust of everyone I’ve disappointed. From day one, I’ve always tried
to be an honest man. I ran for Congress to make a difference and not
just be another politician.

McAllister was elected in November 2013 special election after GOP Rep.
Rodney Alexander resigned to join the administration of Gov. Bobby
Jindal. During his campaign McAllister sought and received the
endorsement of the Duck Dynasty clan.

The
following are all relevant, fact-based issues, the "hard news" stories
that the media has a responsibility to report. But the business-oriented
press generally avoids them.

1. U.S. Wealth Up $34 Trillion Since Recession. 93% of You Got Almost None of It.

That's
an average of $100,000 for every American. But the people who already
own most of the stocks took almost all of it. For them, the average gain
was well over a million dollars -- tax-free as long as they don't cash
it in. Details available here.

2. Eight Rich Americans Made More Than 3.6 Million Minimum Wage Workers

A recent report stated
that no full-time minimum wage worker in the U.S. can afford a
one-bedroom or two-bedroom rental at fair market rent. There are 3.6 million such workers, and their total (combined) 2013 earnings is less than the 2013 stock market gains of just eight Americans, all of whom take more than their share from society: the four Waltons, the two Kochs, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett.

3. News Sources Speak for the 5%

It
would be refreshing to read an honest editorial: "We dearly value the 5
to 7 percent of our readers who make a lot of money and believe that
their growing riches are helping everyone else."

Instead, the business media seems unable to differentiate between the top 5 percent and the rest of society. The Wall Street Journalexclaimed, "Middle-class Americans have more buying power than ever before," and then went on to sputter: "What Recession?...The economy has bounced back from recession, unemployment has declined.."

The Chicago Tribune may
be even further out of touch with its less privileged readers, asking
them: "What's so terrible about the infusion of so much money into the
presidential campaign?"

4. TV News Dumbed Down for American Viewers

A 2009 survey by the European Journal of Communication compared
the U.S. to Denmark, Finland, and the UK in the awareness and reporting
of domestic vs. international news, and of 'hard' news (politics,
public administration, the economy, science, technology) vs. 'soft' news
(celebrities, human interest, sport and entertainment). The results:

-- Americans [are] especially uninformed about international public affairs.-- American respondents also underperformed in relation to domestic-related hard news stories.

-- American television reports much less international news than Finnish, Danish and British television;-- American television network newscasts also report much less hard news than Finnish and Danish television.

Surprisingly,
the report states that "our sample of American newspapers was more
oriented towards hard news than their counterparts in the European
countries." Too bad Americans are reading less newspapers.

5. News Execs among White Male Boomers Who Owe Trillions to Society

The
hype about the "self-made man" is fantasy. In the early 1970s, we
privileged white males were spirited out of college to waiting jobs in
management and finance, technology was inventing new ways for us to make
money, tax rates were about to tumble, and visions of bonuses and
capital gains danced in our heads.

While
we were in school the Defense Department had been preparing the
Internet for Microsoft and Apple, the National Science Foundation was
funding the Digital Library Initiative research that would be adopted as the Google model, and the National Institute of Health was
doing the early laboratory testing for companies like Merck and Pfizer.
Government research labs and public universities trained thousands of
chemists, physicists, chip designers, programmers, engineers, production
line workers, market analysts, testers, troubleshooters, etc., etc.

All we created on our own was a disdainful attitude, like that of Steve Jobs: "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.".-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thursday, April 3, 2014

Here are some headlines for all y'all to enjoy. Do they describe what you want America to be? If they are not --- DO SOMETHING. Organize, vote, write letters, show real support for those who describe and support REAL AMERICAN VALUES -- not the KKKonservative - KKKristian - Right-Wing-Republican crap they are ALL selling.

Read some REAL American History, not the tortured, revisionist, crap David Barton is selling. Please, learn about your country. Support the egalitarian dream that was America.
----------------------------------------------------------

From Robert Reich -- please follow link to original
----------------------------------------------http://robertreich.org/

Every year I ask my class on “Wealth and Poverty” to play a simple
game. I have them split up into pairs, and imagine I’m giving one of
them $1,000. They can keep some of the money only on condition they
reach a deal with their partner on how it’s to be divided up between
them. I explain they’re strangers who will never see one other again,
can only make one offer and respond with one acceptance (or decline),
and can only communicate by the initial recipient writing on a piece of
paper how much he’ll share with the other, who must then either accept
(writing “deal” on the paper) or decline (“no deal”).
You might think many initial recipients of the imaginary $1,000 would
offer $1 or even less, which their partner would gladly accept. After
all, even one dollar is better than ending up with nothing at all.
But that’s not what happens. Most of the $1,000 recipients are far
more generous, offering their partners at least $250. And most of
partners decline any offer under $250, even though “no deal” means
neither of them will get to keep anything.
This game, or variations of it, have been played by social scientists
thousands of times with different groups and pairings, with
surprisingly similar results.
A far bigger version of the game is now being played on the national
stage. But it’s for real — as a relative handful of Americans receive
ever bigger slices of the total national income while most average
Americans, working harder than ever, receive smaller ones. And just as
in the simulations, the losers are starting to say “no deal.”
According to polls, they’ve said no deal to the pending Trans Pacific Trade Agreement, for example, and Congress is on the way to killing it.
It’s true that history and policy point to overall benefits from
expanded trade because all of us gain access to cheaper goods and
services. But in recent years the biggest gains from trade have gone to
investors and executives while the burdens have fallen
disproportionately on those in the middle and below who have lost
good-paying jobs.
By the same token, most Americans are saying “no deal” to further tax
cuts for the wealthy and corporations. In fact, some are now voting to
raise taxes on the rich in order to pay for such things as better
schools, as evidenced by the election of Bill de Blasio as mayor of New
York.
Conservatives say higher taxes on the rich will slow economic growth.
But even if this argument contains a grain of truth, it’s a non-starter
as long as 95 percent of the gains from growth continue to go to the
top 1 percent – as they have since the start of the recovery in 2009.
Why would people turn down a deal that made them better off simply because it made someone else far, far better off?
Some might call this attitude envy or spite. That’s the conclusion of
Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, in a recent oped column for the New York Times. But he’s dead wrong.
It’s true that people sometimes feel worse off when others do better.
There’s an old Russian story about a suffering peasant whose neighbor
is rich and well-connected. In time, the rich neighbor obtains a cow,
something the peasant could never afford. The peasant prays to God for
help. When God asks the peasant what he wants God to do, the peasant
replies, “Kill the cow.”
But Americans have never been prone to “kill the cow” type envy. When
our neighbor gets the equivalent of new cow (or new car), we want one,
too.
Yet we are sensitive to perceived unfairness. When I ask those of my
students who refuse to accept even $200 in the distribution game why
they did so, they rarely mention feelings of envy or spite. They talk
instead about unfairness. “Why should she get so much?” they ask. “It’s
unfair.”
Remember, I gave out the $1,000 arbitrarily. The initial recipients didn’t have to work for it or be outstanding in any way.
When a game seems rigged, losers may be willing to sacrifice some
gains in order to prevent winners from walking away with far more — a
result that might feel fundamentally unfair.
To many Americans, the U.S. economy of recent years has become a vast
casino in which too many decks are stacked and too many dice are
loaded. I hear it all the time: The titans of Wall Street made
unfathomable amounts gambling with our money, and when their bets went
bad in 2008 we had to bail them out. Yet although millions of Americans
are still underwater and many remain unemployed, not a single top Wall
Street banker has been indicted. In fact, they’re making more money now
than ever before.
Top hedge-fund managers pocketed more than a billion dollars each
last year, and the stock market is higher than it was before the crash.
But the typical American home is worth less than before, and most
Americans can’t save a thing. CEOs are now earning more than 300 times
the pay of the typical worker yet the most workers are earning less, and
many are barely holding on.
In 2001, a Gallup poll found
76 percent of Americans satisfied with opportunities to get ahead by
working hard, and only 22 percent were dissatisfied. But since then, the
apparent arbitrariness and unfairness of the economy have taken a toll.
Satisfaction has steadily declined and dissatisfaction increased. Only
54 percent are now satisfied, 45 percent dissatisfied.According to Pew,
the percentage of Americans who feel most people who want to get ahead
can do so through hard work has dropped by 14 points since about 2000.
Another related explanation I get from students who refuse $200 or
more in the distribution game: They worry that if the other guy ends up
with most of the money, he’ll also end up with most of the power. That
will rig the game even more. So they’re willing to sacrifice some gain
in order to avoid a steadily more lopsided and ever more corrupt
politics.
Here again, the evidence is all around us. Big money had already
started inundating our democracy before “Citizens United vs. Federal
Election Commission” opened the sluice gates, but now our democracy is
drowning. Only the terminally naive would believe this money is intended
to foster the public interest.
What to do? Improving our schools is critically important. Making
work pay by raising the minimum wage and expanding the Earned Income Tax
Credit would also be helpful.
But these are only a start. In order to ensure that future
productivity gains don’t go overwhelmingly to a small sliver at the top,
we’ll need a mechanism to give the middle class and the poor a share in
future growth.
One possibility: A trust fund for every child at birth, composed of
an index of stocks and bonds whose value is inversely related to family
income, which becomes available to them when they turn eighteen. Through
the magic of compounded interest, this could be a considerable sum. The
funds would be financed by a small surtax on capital gains and a tax on
all financial transactions.
We must also get big money out of politics — reversing “Citizens
United” by constitutional amendment if necessary, financing campaigns by
matching the contributions of small donors with public dollars, and
requiring full disclosure of everyone and every corporation contributing
to (or against) a candidate.
If America’s distributional game continues to create a few big
winners and many who consider themselves losers by comparison, the
losers will try to stop the game — not out of envy but out of a
deep-seated sense of unfairness and a fear of unchecked power and
privilege. Then we all lose.

About Me

I'm just another old woman who has had wide ranging interests for a long time,
These include fishing, shooting, reading, cooking, and all manner of (mostly) left wing politics.
Born and bred in New York - Queens, to be precise - I now live in Texas, another state that folks seem to attack (like N.Y.) without ever having been here.
I'm also a fan of most sports -- esp. baseball, esp. the New York Yankees.
Originally a New York Giants (baseball) fan, I was crushed when they moved. It took many years wandering in the wilderness before I returned to baseball. I's all Wade Boggs fault. When I watched that artist, my love for baseball resurfaced. Since he was then a Yankee -- it had to be the Yankees.
The Mets pretended they had spiritual ties to the old Brooklyn Dodgers - no Giant fan could go there.
I tried - couldn't do it.